Commentary

In Pod We Trust, Nielsen Fuses Edison Data Into Media Planning

It's been nearly a dozen years since Nielsen acquired radio audience measurement service Arbitron, and rebranded it as "Nielsen Audio," and a lot has changed in both the audio media and how it is measured, including a long pattern of collaboration between Nielsen and another highly-regarded, independent research entity Edison Research.

To illustrate that point, Nielsen and Edison this morning unveiled yet another new collaborative product, the "Nielsen Podcast Fusion powered by Edison Research."

For those planners and buyers who are not technically-inclined bout media audience measurement methodologies, a fusion is a method in which two different survey-based research suppliers integrate their data at a fundamental level -- usually by "hooking" the common attributes of respondents in their separate surveys to extrapolate how respondents in one survey correlated to the characteristics of respondents in the other.

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If that sounds like a leap of faith, it is generally considered a sound media research method, if done right. And we have to assume that companies like Nielsen and Edison wouldn't do something that's not right.

Also, keep in mind we are now entering a world in which far less sound methods -- including synthetic, AI-generated respondents are not posing as actual consumers to yield fast, hard-to-get responses. More on that another time.

As far as the new Nielsen/Edison fusion goes, it's hard to understand what explicitly is under the hood based on this morning's announcement, but at least two pedigree podcast media companies -- NPR and Ocean Media -- have signed on as charter subscribers, so that says something.

Beyond that, the companies say the new collaboration will fuse Edison's "Podcast Metrics" database with Nielsen's "Media Impact" media planning tool, so at the very least, it shouldn't be a heavy lift or big learning curve for planners and buyers already familiar with using that. It will just include a new, ostensibly better source of information about actual podcast listenership.

Among other things, that fusion will enable advertisers and agencies to compare and plan podcast alongside TV, radio, digital and social media buys, making for a more holistic process than dabbling across disparate databases.

According to this morning's announcement, that's an important development because podcasts now account for nearly a third (32%) of the entire ad-supported audio marketplace.

For background, this is not Nielsen's and Edison's first rodeo together.

Nielsen already markets Edison's "Share of Ear" and "Podcast Metrics" reports and the two companies publish the quarterly "The Record" report.

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